Magic in Ithkar Read Online Free Page B

was a general stirring as the crowd examined itself for fault, and he was mostly through it, easing away.
    “That one! Stop him!”
    He broke and ran as he had run when he was fruit-nipping in the autumn-market, when his legs were short and the tavern-keepers who kept the few permanent inns had not tried hard to catch him—no finesse in those days, none now, but a heart-thumping race, jostling fairgoers, oh, Lords, himself well dressed and moving wrong, drawing every eye, the fine clothes that had protected him now become the thief-catching mark, individual, describable—
    His head swam. Startled ladies dodged him, he them, a knot of priests called out at him—he dived aside, through a curtained tangle of guy-ropes and pegs, and, weaving through the maze behind the tents, hid himself, hugged himself, faint and tucked up as he had hidden beneath the tavern stairs—
    “Sphix,” his mother would call. “Oh, Sphix, come out of there, I know where you be, imp—”
    He bowed his head and squeezed tears from his eyes; looked up in a flood of sun against the flap. Shadows came and went like the puppet-plays, all strange with dazzle. He thought that he would faint, but fainting was not so easily achieved. Panic passed. No one came. Just the shadows. The hue and cry died down. He was trapped there, in a young gentleman’s clothes, in a place no sensible young gentleman would get himself, in a place no thief ought to, and himself gut-aching with hunger and exhaustion, while the shadows dimmed and the day waned, and the ground beneath him went cold.

    The voices grew fewer: there were the shouts of merchants to apprentices, closing down.
    (Oh, Lords, don’t let them move the flap aside.)
    The voices grew louder, though fewer: the walled shops shut their iron gates and barred their shutters for the night; the lords and ladies of the pavilions sought entertainments among their own rank; the merchants of the tents rolled up their displays and betook them to safekeepings the temple provided (for a fee), to roister or commiserate the night away down among the taverns. Ithkar Fair changed its dress and became carnival, ceased glitter and became torchlit gaud. The gimcrack dealers ruled the night; the sellers of gold-washed trinkets, of glass gems and tinsel crowns, of luck-pieces and charms of spectacular bad taste.
    But some jewelers merely changed displays, or put apprentices on duty, or rented for the night.
    Into such a transformation Sphix crept, from beneath the overlap of two canvas displays; and if he staggered, it was not unlike the young bravos (some of them nobility pretending otherwise) and ruffians (some pretending nobility they had not) who careened through the aisles in this quarter beneath the temple’s very walls, their wits and their manners left in the ale tents. They shouted and laughed, jostling him this way and that.
    He walked—he knew only direction now. He lost whole tracts of the course, passing through the aisles, knocking into drunken celebrants; and thinking, thinking how quickest to turn the stone to some few coins, to fill his stomach; roust old Tomek out and trade these clothes before the dawn—
    The tents and booths began to be those of clothiers, like the gimcrack arts of near-the-walls, the cheaper goods left on display, the gaudy, the tawdry, the well used. He looked about him, dazed, trying to know where he might be. A set of carousers bore down on him.
    One caught his arm, swung him with them—he tried to fling out again, feigning merriment. The arc swept on, imperiled tent-pegs and ropes, bore him stumbling beyond the torches of the aisle.
    Then he struck and darted to escape in panic; but one seized him by the sleeve—it tore. He ran, stumbled on a guy-rope, and sprawled among the stakes.
    They hauled him up again. “It’s Khussan’s lad,” one said. He knew that voice without the torchlight that filtered through the tents and showed the black-bearded man, the broken nose, the gapped